John S.W. Park Professor of Asian American Studies June 2018; and Last Updated on December 10, 2018

John S.W. Park Professor of Asian American Studies June 2018; and last updated on December 10, 2018 Notes and Suggestions from Chapter 10, The Future of American Migrations, Immigration Law and Society (Polity, 2018) Beginning in the 1970s, in states like Texas and in California, political leaders supported expansive, new criminal codes that accelerated what was already a disturbing trend—the United States was incarcerating a much larger fraction of its population than ever before. The trend began when more Americans were using controlled substances and when violent crimes were often tied to drug addiction, but through the Reagan Administration and into the Clinton years, “mass incarceration” was becoming a most obvious, dominant trend in state and federal governments. In California, the legislature increased public funds for prisons and “correction,” such that they approached, and then exceeded, appropriations for public higher education. Texas built many new prisons to house more inmates than ever before, and it pursued other policies that reflected this harsher turn in the criminal law. Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1976; Texas has executed over 550 inmates since then. By 2010, the United States was incarcerating roughly 800% more people than it had in 1970. About 1.5 million people were in state or federal custody at any given moment, not counting persons held in detention or in local jails prior to their criminal trials. Researchers also noted clear racial disparities in the rates of incarceration: the odds that a white male will be under the supervision of the criminal justice system at some point in his life were 1 in 9; for Latino men, they were 1 in 6; and for African American men, they were 1 in 3. People of color were about a third of the American population in 2010, but they were two-thirds of the American prison population. These were not random patterns, however, and yet nowhere was the gap between social science research and public policy so wide—leading researchers provided mountains of data to show that many jurisdictions were “governing through crime,” in ways that were racially biased, and that exacerbated racial inequality and racial disparities. Local, state, and federal officials were enforcing laws in ways that targeted communities of color and created cultures of fear, often by relying on a small number of sensational, highly publiciZed cases to justify all the punishment. The aggregate social science clearly showed, though, that after a certain point, mass incarceration was not deterring crime.1 Leading politicians, though, were undeterred: when he was running for President of the United States, George H.W. Bush ran an infamous political ad that featured Willie Horton, a convicted murderer. Bush and his supporters ran that ad over and over again, a single, 1 sensational case, over and over, and it suggested that if you were voting for the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, you were going to let him release people like Willie Horton all over America. President Bush won the election, but two years later, his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, was diagnosed with a crippling brain tumor. As the illness progressed, Mr. Atwater apologiZed to Mr. Dukakis—Atwater described the ad and other campaign strategies as acts of “naked cruelty” (against Dukakis). Mr. Atwater conceded that others would see his political strategy as racist, although Atwater denied that he was, in fact, racist. He never apologiZed to any particular African American, however, nor to African Americans in general, nor to white voters who were terrified and voted for Bush because of his ads, but he did acknowledge that this kind of racially-charged political campaigning was not good for America, or for him. He had many regrets. Lee Atwater passed away in March 1991, about one year after he’d been diagnosed with brain cancer.2 * * * * * Governor Pete Wilson insisted that he was not racist either, but in 1994, his re-election campaign and other supporters of Proposition 187 in California were running ads of “illegals” rushing across the southern border, “invading” the state. The ads looked so…familiar. They were shot in a grainy black-and-white, and the narrator pleaded for law and order against these people of color, framed as criminals. The ad suggested that if you voted for the Democrat, the entire state would turn Mexican, infested with “illegal.” The ad looked as though Lee Atwater could have made this himself. In American history, there are rare, singular moments that mark a shift in the public culture, and I’m not certain that this particular ad marked such a shift, but it certainly didn’t help—politicians and political campaigns were portraying immigrants as criminals, the people crossing the border as wrongdoers. These very people could have been Central American, not Mexican, and they could have been seeking asylum in the United States, as was their right under international treaties and under American refugee law, but all of the nuances of their condition were reduced to a blunt, nefarious criminality. Instead of triggering compassion or empathy or even a desire for a fair hearing of their claims, this ad did the exact opposite. Again, like George Bush or Lee Atwater, Pete Wilson insisted that he was not racist, that he didn’t mean to promote a racist, anti-Latino ad, and 2 yet I assure you, thousands of other people saw the same kind of racism running through these things. A “dog whistle” is a high-pitched whistle that only dogs can hear—among American political strategist, a “dog whistle” appeal is one that speaks to people with overt or latent bias, and the appeal is designed to affirm that bias. If, for example, some people were already biased against Mexicans and other Latinos, or if they didn’t like “illegals” in general, the ads for Proposition 187 were loud and clear appeals for them to vote in favor of a rule that would cut them off from all social services and perhaps cause them to self-deport.3 * * * * * Voting has consequences, and whether people are voting based on clear-eyed assessments and analysis, or fear and irrationality, or some combination of these factors, all votes count the same. Many politicians figure out that fear and irrationality can tip a close election, and so it’s not surprising that many candidates for high office resort to such tactics. People who make irrational promises tend to keep them: through 1990 and 1996, many politicians stoked fears toward immigrants, people of color, immigrants of color, and once in office, they supported immigration rules that became more punitive. The Immigration Act of 1990 defined entering the United States without inspection as a federal crime; the rules in 1996 greatly enlarged the grounds of “removable” offenses, and then they eliminated forms of relief from deportation for those with criminal convictions. Congress re-defined “deportation” itself—it was now called “removal.” By changing this basic definition, members of Congress attempted to set aside a long line of federal precedents that once protected people who’d faced “deportation.” All of these changes had popular support: President Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which had been co-sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy; and President Clinton signed the rules in 1996, many of them co-sponsored by leading Republicans, including Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, and Representative Jay Kim of California, the first Korean American congressman in the United States. After 1990, the United States progressed toward an era of “mass deportation,” or maybe “mass removal,” and this trend resembled the one toward mass incarceration in many ways. Both trends—removal and incarceration—disproportionately targeted people of color. Even though Europeans, Asians, and Canadians were also “out of status” or “subject to deportation,” federal immigration officials were not targeting, say, areas just south of the Canadian border to round up those horrible Canadians. Irish migrants, South Koreans, and Eastern Europeans were coming to the United States on valid visas of one kind or another ever since the late 1970s, and then they were falling “out of status,” but again, federal officials never went after these folks in work-place raids, early-morning round-ups, or random airport check-points. Federal officials concentrated their efforts in areas north of the southern border, in workplaces with a significant number of Latinos, to the point where it all smacked of racial profiling. In several leading cases, the United States Supreme Court suggested that this kind of profiling was disturbing, maybe unconstitutional.4 Mass deportation, though, continued, just like mass incarceration. Over the last two and a half decades, the United States has “removed” more people than in any period in its history. 3 Under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the United States removed and removed and removed, and these Presidents created strange new diasporas in Mexico and in Central America. Yet, if nothing else, these American deportees tended to underscore the interconnectedness of the United States and its southern neighbors, in ways that were both boring and deadly. It could be boring: if you had had a complaint with your credit card bill in 2010, for example, your 1 (800) call was often routed to Guatemala City, where a guy who grew up in LA could go over your recent charges with you. He spoke perfect English because he’d grown up in Inglewood, he was an American deportee listening to your concerns. That’s just weird. After 1990, though, many more American deportees were involved in much more dangerous and lucrative trades, like drug trafficking, lots and lots of drug trafficking, and their numbers swelled the cartels and accelerated horrific levels of violence all the way south into Columbia and Bolivia.

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